Queer Privilege
http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-hacker-issue/life/on-queer-privilege "Queer privilege, born out of the minoritarian theoretical discourses that galvanized the humanities between, oh, 1975 or so and the early 90s, rooted in an immensely popular (mis)reading of Foucault, is grounded in the idea of a link between the normativity of an act and its ethical valence. The argument, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, is that because historically the regulatory maintenance of normative social formations has involved the repression and oppression of sexual minorities and non-hetero-reproductive sexual practices, the expression and performance of minoritarian sexual identities and non-reproductive sexual acts has, in itself and a priori, a resistive or subversive value. Queer privilege is the tacit assumption that, confronted with a moral or ethical question, the minoritarian, perverse, and non-normative, in short, the queer, will align on the side of the right and the good against the normative, heterosexual, or mainstream alternative. Queer privilege is the tacit assumption that, regardless of the context or the specific individuals involved, normative is bad and queer is good." "But it’s worth pausing to reflect on the tone that queer privilege indulges itself in, to consider the implications of a smug condescension that presumes to judge people’s sexuality based on the way they relate to other people’s genitals added and to evaluate the revolutionary potential of an act based on its statistical prevalence. Is this what we want from queer theorizing? Is this what we need queer theory for – to pass judgment on the moral and revolutionary value of other people’s sex lives based on sweeping assumptions about entire groups and their presumed ethical commitments? Or is that not rather precisely the kind of epistemological blind spot queer analysis was born to shed light on and undo? " Of course not... the point is that the people most marginalised by the cultural norms central to kyriarchy are also going to be the most consistent and reliable allies against it. It's not a pissing contest, but yes it does confer certain limited privileges on those people who are multiply queer. Autistic, trans and gay, for example. "The thing we have to remember, always, is that a concept as a whole contains both itself and the possibility of its negation; both sides of a binary opposition, A and not-A, together form a single concept. Thus the concept of “normativity” accounts, as a concept, both for a norm and for the idea of deviations from it. This means, as I have often written, that it is impossible to detach or ethically distinguish the normative from the non-normative; the two are always bound up, the one in the shadow of the other, and there is no conception of non-normativity that does not always already bear upon itself the stamp of the normal. More importantly, it means that there is no outside to the binary opposition normative/non-normative. This claim isn’t anything new; it’s the basic premise of all deconstruction. But in our context, it’s a crucial reminder of the fact that subversions, resistances, and revolutions are not born outside but within, not beyond the limits of the normative but precisely at the porous line where the normative and the non-normative slip in and out of each other. If queerness is not a stable identity but is in some way the different and the unknown, then the emergence of the queer, the becoming-visible of difference, is as likely to happen at a nominally “heteronormative” site as it is to happen at a nominally “queer” one." Hmm, really love the fusion of relativity and duality in here but have to admit I don't quite resonate with the application here. People who do find comfort in normative behaviours are privileged in that comfort, they don't experience the same urgency in their daily oppression as someone more marginalised by those norms. We should always prioritise the needs of the desperate over the needs of the comfortable, but that is not to say that the needs of the normative are not valid and deserving of support and acknowledgement. It is just a matter of prioritising the most marginalised. "Is queer privilege something we need to be worried about? Is it something we should actively resist? Well, it’s all relative, right? In different contexts and at different times, hierarchies of power shift, and with them the relationship of different groups and individuals to what we have come to call “privilege.” Queer privilege is an entirely insignificant thing to be worried about in light of, say, racism, poverty, governmental corruption and police brutality. So to the extent that what nominally fuels the engine of queer theorizing is on some level a social or moral investment, queer privilege is honestly not worth worrying about right now. But to the extent that queer theory is, at least in part, born of theoretical projects invested in rigorous conceptual analysis, it is certainly an elephant that we might not want in the room. A pygmy elephant, maybe, but still."Now here's a point where I agree. We want to acknowledge relative privileges like 'queer privilege' without diminishing the wider and much more high-priority reality of real, structural privileges like misogyny and racism. However, if we maintain a culture whereby privilege is not fully acknowledged, then how can we ever dismantle structural privilege?Acknowledging situational privileges is necessary for the cognitive shift into discourse as relative equals.Category:Queer Theory Category:Post-Modernism Category:Privilege Category:Oppression Category:Imaginary Privileges